Jackson Pollock' Biography of Jackson Pollock Biography of Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 - August 11, 1956), was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life . In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related car accident. In December 1956, he was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and a larger more comprehensive exhibition there in 1967. More recently, in 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London. Early Life Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, the youngest of five sons.

His parents, Stella May McClure and Leroy Pollock, grew up in Tingley, Iowa. His father had been born McCoy but took the surname of his neighbors, who adopted him after his own parents had died within a year of each other. Stella and LeRoy Pollock were Presbyterian; the former, Irish; the latter, Scotch-Irish. LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. Jackson grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. While living in Echo Park, California, he enrolled at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School, from which he was expelled, after having been expelled another high school in 1928. During his early life, he experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. In 1930, following his brother Charles Pollock, he moved to New York City where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. Benton's rural American subject matter shaped Pollock's work only fleetingly, but his rhythmic use of paint and his fierce independence were more lasting influences. From 1938 to 1942, Pollock worked for the WPA Federal Art Project.

In attempts to fight his alcoholism, from 1938 through 1941 Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph Henderson and later with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo in 1941-1942. Dr. Henderson was an eclectic who drew upon the spectrum of psychoanalytic theory, including Freud and Jung. Henderson made the decision to engage him through his art and had Pollock make drawings, which led to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings. Recently it has been hypothesized that Pollock might have had bipolar disorder. The Springs period and the unique technique In October 1945 Pollock married American painter Lee Krasner, and in November they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, at 830 Springs Fireplace Road, in Springs on Long Island, NY. Peggy Guggenheim lent them the down payment for the wood-frame house with a nearby barn that Pollock converted into a studio. There he perfected the technique of working with paint with which he became permanently identified.

Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop operated in New York City by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, such as "Male and Female" and "Composition with Pouring I." After his move to Springs, he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique, turning to synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which, at that time, was a novel medium. Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artist's paints, as "a natural growth out of a need." He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas.

By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions. One possible influence on Pollock was the work of the Ukrainian American artist Janet Sobel (1894-1968) (born Jennie Lechovsky). Sobel's work is related to the so-called "drip paintings" of Jackson Pollock. Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel's work in her The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945. The critic Clement Greenberg, with Jackson Pollock, saw Sobel's work there in 1946, and in his essay "American-Type' Painting" Greenberg cited those works as the first instance of all-over painting he had seen, stating that "Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him". In the process of making paintings in this way, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. He also moved away from the use of only the hand and wrist, since he used his whole body to paint.

In 1956, Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper" as a result of his unique painting style. “My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting” -Jackson Pollock, My Painting “When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” -Jackson Pollock, My Painting Pollock observed Indian sandpainting demonstrations in the 1940s.

Other influences on his dripping technique include the Mexican muralists and Surrealist automatism. Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see. Studies by Taylor, Micolich and Jonas have examined Pollock's technique and have determined that some works display the properties of mathematical fractals. They assert that the works become more fractal-like chronologically through Pollock's career. The authors even speculate that Pollock may have had an intuition of the nature of chaotic motion, and attempted to form a representation of mathematical chaos, more than ten years before "Chaos Theory" itself was proposed. Other experts suggest that Pollock may have merely imitated popular theories of the time in order to give his paintings a depth not previously seen.

The 1950s Pollock's most famous paintings were made during the "drip period" between 1947 and 1950. He rocketed to popular status following an August 8, 1949 four-page spread in Life magazine that asked, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style. Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. This was followed by a return to color, and he reintroduced figurative elements. During this period Pollock had moved to a more commercial gallery and there was great demand from collectors for new paintings. In response to this pressure, along with personal frustration, his alcoholism deepened . Death In 1955, Pollock painted Scent and Search which would be his last two paintings. Pollock did not paint at all in 1956.

After struggling with alcoholism for his entire adult life, Pollock, on August 11, 1956, at 10:15 pm, died in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol. One of the passengers, Edith Metzger, was also killed in the accident, which occurred less than a mile from Pollock's home. The other passenger, Pollock's mistress Ruth Kligman, survived. After Pollock's demise at age 44, his widow, Lee Krasner, managed his estate and ensured that Pollock's reputation remained strong despite changing art-world trends. They are buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs with a large boulder marking his grave and a smaller one marking hers. MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS Jackson Pollock - Artist Biography for Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956) Jackson Pollock was active/lived in New York, Wyoming. Jackson Pollock is known for gestural painting, abstract expressionism.

The Artist click to hear Born in Cody, Wyoming to Scotch-Irish parents, Jackson Pollock was dubbed "Jack the Dripper" (Time magazine 1956) for his revolutionary technique of gestural painting that freed generations of American artists from academic strictures. He used dissonant, garish colors, and applied paint with energetic circular motions to large canvases so that his work exuded physical energy. It also, according to many art historians, reflected his own turbulent, manic depressive personality. Pollock was raised in Arizona and California and helped his father in the late 1920s with a surveying job on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. It is thought that his life-long compulsive fear and fascination of vast, open spaces "probably originated at this time". (Anschutz Collection) During these years, he and his brothers investigated Indian mounds near Phoenix by the home of a family named Minsch where Pollock's mother worked as a housekeeper. From those experiences, Pollock later used occasional Indian symbolism in his paintings. He also had ongoing interest in Southwest Indians and under his bed kept twelve volumes on these subjects of illustrated annual reports from the Smithsonian Institution.

After living as a youth in Arizona and not finishing high school, he left to join his brother, Charles Cecil Pollock, at the Art Students League in New York. He never again lived in the West but went through on visits to California. His nostalgia for the West persisted, and he frequently dressed in cowboy garb; some thought his personality traits were akin to those of legendary cowboys--a loner, melancholy, rash, impulsive, quiet, and alcoholic. He went to the Art Students League with the intention of studying with Thomas Hart Benton, the most celebrated artist of the Depression and later a well-known Regionalist painter from Missouri. Benton took a particular interest in Pollock because Benton preferred friendships with "virile and honest" people from the West and Midwest like himself. Benton had the greatest influence on Pollack, teaching that the artist's experience with painting was of more importance than the resulting work. Benton promoted theories of rhythmic balance, dynamic sequence, and "muscular action patterns," all of which Pollock utilized later in his work. Pollock, from his earliest days studying art in California, was also much influenced by techniques of El Greco, Spanish painter, whose rhythmic repetition of forms he adopted.

In the summers in the 1930s, Pollock would "hit the highway," often going through Oklahoma and the Panhandle of Texas, and from these experiences he did prints showing cowboy and farm activity. He also had work as a W.P.A. artist, working in the Mural Division, which required one painting a month for a public building. By the late 1930s, he was seeking professional treatment for alcoholic depression. He did many expressive paintings, which he said were intended to free him of the yoke of Benton's influence and from his mental problems. He also came under the influence of the Mexican muralists David Siqueiros, Jose Orozco, and Diego Rivera, whose extensive use of symbolism Pollock utilized in his large-scale paintings. In the 1940s, his emotional turmoil led him to themes that were mythic and heroic in highly abstract styles including Cubism, Surrealist automatism, Abstract Expressionism, and the biomorphic forms of Joan Miro. For him, a turning point for public recognition came with his friendship with Peggy Guggenheim, wealthy New York heiress whose money built the Guggenheim Museum.

In November, 1943, she gave him a solo exhibition and a contract guaranteeing him one-hundred fifty dollars a month for a year, freeing him from financial straits. She also commissioned him to decorate her apartment. This first Guggenheim exhibition was followed by two others for Pollock. For her, this was the beginning of promoting her "war babies," unknown American artists whom she thought had promise, and for him, her show of confidence in his work was a great boost to his ego and reputation. Pollock married Lee Krasner, a Russian Jewish artist, with whom he had a crisis-driven relationship but a sharing of interest in mysticism and avant-garde painting. They lived at East Hampton on Long Island, and the move away from the city seemed by 1946 to have a freeing effect on his painting. Much influenced by her theories and encouragement, he began painting increasingly with drips, smears, and giant circular motions over smaller geometric shapes. This technique seemed particularly inspired by readying for an exhibit in 1947 arranged by Betty Parsons, who took over Peggy Guggenheim's Gallery. He made a transition to mural size works asserting that easel painting was a dying form.

He laid canvases on the floor, where he felt nearer his work, and feeling totally into the work, likened it to Indian sand painting. He applied paint with sticks, trowels, knives, and by dripping paint. He spoke of the painting taking on a life of its own, and a sense of pure harmony with the creation. It set a new standard in American art, especially when Pollock abandoned brushes completely for dripping and pouring paint to avoid the disruption of reloading the paint brush. He said he had a general notion of what he was about before beginning but that the painting also took on a life of its own. For a period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he abstained from alcohol and lived quietly on Long Island. However, his success with these works seems to have paralyzed him, and he felt his privacy eroded. Life magazine had a feature on him suggesting that he was "the greatest living painter in the United States." He returned to drink, which seemed to trigger his creativity, but his paintings began to lack color and were horrifying with eyes and totems. They were done scroll-like with thin black paint on huge bolts of unsized duck cloth.

He also did scary self portraits, which revealed himself as tense, confused and despairing. Financially neither he nor Krasner did well and lived off wealthy friends, and the only time he made serious money was 1956, the last year of his life. However, by then, he was producing virtually nothing and was drinking constantly. On August 27, 1956, he died in a one-car auto crash, in which one other person, his female passenger was also killed. He had been a turbulent soul, stilled by the alcoholism that so dominated his life. However, his influence on American art is monumental, reinforced by the fact that ARTNews magazine selected him as one of the top twenty-five most important-ever western artists. According to the article, he "shattered pictorial space." Source: Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art ARTnews, May, 1999 Jackson Pollock Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Like The Art Story on Facebook Follow The Art Story on Google+ "It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said.

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." Synopsis In its edition of August 8th, 1949, Life magazine ran a feature article about Jackson Pollock that bore this question in the headline: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Could a painter who flung paint at canvases with a stick, who poured and hurled it to create roiling vortexes of color and line, possibly be considered "great"? New York's critics certainly thought so, and Pollock's pre-eminence among the Abstract Expressionists has endured, cemented by the legend of his alcoholism and his early death. The famous 'drip paintings' that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century. At times they could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. Key Ideas Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West shaped him into the bullish character he would become.

Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space. In 1939, Pollock began visiting a Jungian analyst to treat his alcoholism, and his analyst encouraged him to create drawings. These would later feed his paintings, and they shaped Pollock's understanding of his pictures not only as outpourings of his own mind, but expressions that might stand for the terror of all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war. Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space. Most Important Art Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950) While only one painting from Pollock's 1950 solo exhibition was actually sold, the show gained much attention.

It was described by Art News as one of the three best exhibitions of the year, and Cecil Beaton staged a famous fashion shoot in the exhibition space, which subsequently appeared in Vogue. Autumn Rhythm was one of the major works which appeared in that show. As with many of Pollock's paintings, he began it with a linear framework of diluted black paint which in many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he applied more skeins of paint in various colors - lines thick and thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. As the title suggests, the coloring, horizontal orientation, and sense of ground and space in Autumn Rhythm are strongly evocative of nature. The balance between control and chance that Pollock maintained throughout his working process produced compositions that can have as much calm tranquillity as some works by Rothko. Oil on canvas - Metropolitan Museum of Art Like The Art Story on Facebook Biography Childhood Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the fifth and youngest son of a family of Irish-Scottish extraction. Pollock was only ten months old when the family moved to San Diego.

His father's work as a surveyor would force them to move repeatedly around the Southwest in subsequent years, until, when Pollock was aged nine, his father abandoned the family, only to return when Jackson himself had left home. The West of Pollock's childhood provided a tough upbringing, but he grew to love nature - animals and the expanse of the land - and while living in Phoenix in 1923 he discovered Native American art. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early Training Pollock attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he befriended Philip Guston, and where he was also introduced to theosophical ideas which prepared him for his later interests in Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Two of Pollock's older brothers, Charles and Sanford, also pursued careers as artists, and it was their encouragement which lured him to New York in 1930, where he studied under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.

In New York Pollock was attracted to Old Masters and began to study mural painting. He posed for Benton's 1930-31 murals at the New School for Social Research, and he met the prominent Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. He later spent a summer observing Diego Rivera paint murals at the New Workers School, and in 1936 he joined the Experimental Workshop of another muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, where he learned to employ unorthodox painting techniques. Pollock's own canvas, Going West (1934-35), blends many of these influences and is typical of his style at this time. In 1937, he was assigned to the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. During much of the 1930s Pollock lived with his brothers in Greenwich Village, and was at times so poor that he had to work as a janitor and steal food to survive. In 1932, however, he was invited to participate in the 8th Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels and Drawings by American and French Artists at the Brooklyn Museum, his first exhibition.

Mature Period In 1936, Pollock briefly met Lenore ("Lee") Krasner. In time, their relationship would bring some of the few spells of calm and happiness that Pollock ever knew. But the two did not meet again until 1941, after which they became romantically involved and married in 1945. Meanwhile, Pollock's alcoholism - which had been a problem since his adolescence - drove him into treatment as early as 1938, and by 1939 he was receiving Jungian psychoanalysis. His analyst encouraged him to produce drawings to aid his recovery, and the methods and motifs in these drawings - albeit shaped by Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jose Clemente Orozco and the theories of John Graham - soon found their way into works such as Guardians of the Secret(1943). Despite his personal problems, Pollock remained bullishly confident in his art. Krasner was impressed when she saw his work in the early 1940s and introduced him to her teacher, Hans Hofmann. Hofmann was similarly enthusiastic, and the meeting blossomed into an enduring friendship between the two men.

Hofmann is said to have remarked that Pollock needed to work more from nature, to which Pollock famously replied, "I don't paint nature, I am nature." The WPA came to an end in 1943 and Pollock was forced to find work on his own. Along with various odd-jobs he became a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), and it was there that he met Peggy Guggenheim, who invited him to submit work to her new gallery, Art of This Century. Eventually, Guggenheim put Pollock on a contract, and in 1943 she gave him his first solo exhibition, which was well received. The critic Clement Greenberg noted with approval that Pollock had absorbed and transcended Mexican mural painting, Picasso and Miró. The pictures still carried much figuration, although the references remained concealed - as Pollock said, "I choose to veil the imagery." At the same time, Peggy Guggenheim also commissioned a painting for the entry hall of her New York apartment.

The resulting work was Mural (1943), which would prove important in Pollock's transition from a style shaped by murals, Native American art and European modernism towards his mature drip technique. And it was Guggenheim who again helped Pollock when he needed a down-payment to secure an old farmhouse in the town of The Springs on Long Island. He and Krasner bought the farmhouse in the fall of 1945 and married in October. Krasner hoped that distance from the struggles and temptations of the city would offer a great opportunity for both of them to pursue their painting in seclusion and peace. Exactly how Pollock came upon his drip technique has been a matter of long and inconclusive scholarly argument, but his work was already taking steps towards it in the mid-1940s. He began to lose the symbolic imagery of his earlier pictures and looked for more abstract means of expression. His experience of painting Mural for Guggenheim's apartment was also important in spurring him on, and in 1945 he painted There Were Seven in Eight, a picture in which recognizable imagery was thoroughly suppressed and the surface was knitted together by a vivid tangle of lines.

In the following years his style became more boldly abstract still, and he produced works like Shimmering Substance (1946). The following year he finally hit on the idea of flinging and pouring paint, and thus found the means to create the light, airy and apparently endless webs of color that he was reaching towards. Masterpieces such as Full Fathom Five (1947) were the result. Pollock had carried out another stylistic somersault and arrived at a method that synthesized Impressionism, Surrealism and Cubism. Shimmering Substance led on to works like Number 1A (1948), a larger canvas than Pollock was familiar with, and dense with a dazzling web of color. He found he was best able to approach works such as this by positioning the canvas flat on the floor, moving around it and applying the paint from all sides. By dipping a small stick, house brush or trowel into the paint and then rapidly moving his wrist, arm and body, he allowed it to drip and fall in weaving rhythms over the surface. The technique - the epitome of what critic Harold Rosenberg would call "action painting" - rarely permitted the brush to directly touch the canvas.

"On the floor I am more at ease," he said. "I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting." Pollock's work thus became as much about process as they were about product. They became a record of the performance of painting - his play in and around the canvas, where he could enter them as a participant and hover above them as their creator. "There is no accident," Pollock once said, "just as there is no beginning or end.. Sometimes I lose a painting, but I have no fear of changes, of destroying the image, because a painting has a life of its own." Critics were quick to recognize the power of Pollock mature work. Greenberg, who would be his staunchest and most powerful supporter, wrote at the time, "[His] superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control." But when Pollock's pictures reached a wider public, through coverage in magazines such as Vogue and Life, the response was a mixture of shock and incredulity. Nor was he widely collected at first, having only a small circle of supporters.

Commercial success would soon come, but even at its height - after Art of This Century Gallery had closed and gallery owner Betty Parsons had taken over Pollock's contract - the painter was still being treated for alcoholism. Pollock supposedly stayed dry from mid-1948 to late 1950, and during these years he lived primarily in Long Island, only occasionally coming into the city. In 1950, he had a successful solo exhibition, and, along with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, was selected by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the Venice Biennale. But a year later he was drinking again. Late Period and Death Pollock's radical abstraction seemed to herald an incredible new freedom for painting, yet semblances of recognizable imagery continued to hover in the background of his pictures. The vast expanse of Blue Poles (1952) is knitted together with the aid of diagonal lines. And One: Number 31 (1950) retains a strong sense of rhythmically dancing figures, amidst its remarkable diversity of effects.

Pollock might have abandoned the realism of his youth, but he still managed to make his paintings eloquently metaphorical. Like many of his canvases from this time, One evokes a mood of grandeur which ties it to the tradition of sublime landscape which stretches back into the eighteenth century. It also glistens as if it were dappled with light in the manner of Monet's canvases, and many critics have speculated on whether Pollock was influenced by the French Impressionist. Pollock never really lost his interest in figurative imagery - as he once put it, "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge." As early as the late 1940s, figuration showed signs of resurfacing in his work. By 1950, whilst his drinking increased, he returned to drawing, resurrecting some of his old motifs, and producing a series of mainly black and white poured paintings.

Some, like Yellow Islands (1952), incorporate touches of color and are highly abstract; some, like Echo (Number 25, 1951), are calligraphic in style and only residually figurative; others bear clear images of heads. They were badly received when Pollock first exhibited them, but he continued to work on them right through 1953, his last productive year of work. His personal troubles only increased in his later years. He left Betty Parsons Gallery, and, his reputation preceding him, he struggled to find another gallery. He painted little in 1954, claiming that he had nothing left to say. In the summer of 1956, Krasner took a trip to Europe to get some distance from Pollock, and soon after the painter began a relationship with 25 year old artist Ruth Kligman, who he had met at the Cedar Bar. Then, on the night of August 11, 1956, while Pollock was drunk and out driving with Kligman and her friend, Edith Metzger, he lost control of the car, killing himself and Metzger, and seriously injuring Kligman.

Legacy Pollock's immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and transcended them all. Beside that achievement even greats such as de Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery, seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters would all have to take on his achievement, just as Pollock himself had wrestled with Picasso. And as early as 1958, when pioneering performance artist Allan Kaprow explicitly addressed the question of his legacy in an article for Art News, some were beginning to wonder if Pollock might even have opened up possibilities outside of the realm of painting. To borrow critic Harold Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined the canvas not as "a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object.. [but as] an arena in which to act." And it was a short step from this realization to interpreting Pollock's balletic moves around the canvas as a species of performance art. Since then, Pollock's reputation has only increased.

The subject of many biographies, a movie biopic, and major retrospectives, he has become not only one of the most famous symbols of the alienated modern artist, but also an embodiment for critics and historians of American modernism in its finest hour. Influences and Connections Jackson Pollock, Art History & Styles of Art - Art.com Wiki 6 Some Examples of Jackson Pollock’s Artwork Personal life Jackson Pollock was born to a farmer father and an artist mother, the youngest of five boys. The family moved around when Pollock was young. During the time that they lived in Los Angeles, Pollock began studying art. At the age of eighteen, Pollock moved to New York to live with his older brother Charles, who was also a painter. In New York, Jackson Pollock began studying under Thomas Hart Benton. After viewing a show of Pablo Picasso ’s works, his own painting techniques started to change, and he eventually developed the method for which he is most famous. In 1945, he married Lee Krasner, a fellow artist. In the late 1940s, Pollock’s career began to take off, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of fame.

This led to alcoholism and depression conditions from which he would never really recover. His career took a nosedive, his marriage crumbled, and in 1956 at the age of 44, he died in a car accident. Career Jackson Pollock painted in several different styles, but it was his drip method that garnered the most attention. His first works were completed during the Federal Arts Project, where artists were paid $24.86 a week to create paintings. Pollock’s paintings in this period followed the schools of Surrealism and Regionalism. After his father died, he went into a deep depression and eventually sought treatment. It was during this time that he first developed an interest in symbolism . Some of his earlier works such as The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle and Blue (Moby Dick) show this influence. After viewing a show of works by Picasso , he started working with the method for which he was most famous attaching a canvas to the floor or a wall and dripping paint and other media such as sand or glass onto it. Shimmering Substance and Cathedral were two of the works in this method that helped garner him fame.

He was put on retainer by Peggy Guggenheim in the early 1940s. Later that decade, when his show at the Betty Parsons Gallery sold out, he was considered the Avant-garde painter of the era. However, fame took its toll and Pollock fell into alcoholism. His art took on darker colors, and he later switching completely to black and white, a change that proved unsuccessful. Today, most of Pollock’s works are considered masterpieces. Fun Facts Pollock stopped using symbolic titles for his work because he found them misleading. This is why his later works are numbered. Pollock first studied drawing but could not adequately express himself in the medium. Pollock converted the barn on his farm in East Hampton into a studio. Related Artists Jackson Pollock: Fiction vs. Fact - Biography.com History & Culture Jackson Pollock: Fiction vs. Fact To celebrate what would have been Jackson Pollock's birthday today, Helen A. Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, takes a look at the myths associated with the legendary artist and shares some fascinating facts about his life and work.

Avatar: Social count: 149 To celebrate what would have been Jackson Pollock's birthday today, Helen A. Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, takes a look at the myths associated with the legendary artist and shares some fascinating facts about his life and work. 149 0 Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is a legendary figure in 20th century art. He was the first American artist to gain an international reputation as an innovator without having studied or worked in Europe, the birthplace of modernism. His challenging abstract imagery and unusual painting technique are still controversial today. His works hang in major museums around the world, and his life has been examined in biographies, documentary films, and an eponymous Oscar-winning motion picture, starring Ed Harris as Pollock and Marcia Gay Harden as his wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner . Like many celebrities with enormous talent and troubled personalities who died young—think of James Dean , Marilyn Monroe , and Elvis Presley —Pollock is surrounded by an aura of myth. The reality is often very different, and much more interesting. Here we separate some of the fiction from the facts.

Fiction: Pollock was a cowboy from the Wild West. Fact: Although he sometimes wore cowboy boots and played up his Western background, Pollock never roped steers or rode on a cattle drive—in fact he was afraid of horses. He was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, but the town wasn’t exactly wild. It was a real estate development, founded in 1901 and billed as the gateway to Yellowstone Park. Buffalo Bill Cody , one of the investors, lent his famous name to help promote the venture. The Pollock family moved out of Cody when Jackson was less than a year old. They lived in five different towns in Arizona and California before finally settling in Los Angeles in 1928. Jackson Pollock - Mini Biography (TV-14; 3:26) A short biography of Jackson Pollock, an art icon of Abstract Expressionism best known for his drip paintings, as well as his battle with alcoholism. Fiction: Pollock became an abstract artist because he couldn’t draw. Fact: When he was 18, Pollock moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League.

His figure drawings from those days are no better or worse than those of many art students, and his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton , was impressed by them. He said Pollock “got things out of proportion but found the essential rhythms.” Those essential rhythms later formed the basis of Pollock’s abstract paintings. Fiction: Pollock painted a 20-foot mural in one night. Fact: The painting took weeks to complete. Pollock’s patron, the eccentric art collector Peggy Guggenheim, commissioned it for the hallway of her Manhattan town house. In the Ed Harris movie, there’s a wonderful scene of the all-night painting marathon, now known to be fictional. Recent analysis by the Getty Conservation Institute confirms that some layers of paint dried before others were applied, a process that takes time. The Getty project revealed much fascinating new information about the mural and its creation. Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943. Oil and casein on canvas, 8 x 20 feet. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1959.6. Reproduced with permission from the University of Iowa.

© 2015 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Fiction: Pollock discovered so-called drip painting by accident in 1947. Fact: This is another misconception enshrined in the Pollock movie. For dramatic purposes, Pollock’s years of experimentation with liquid paint were condensed into a single “eureka moment.” He first tried it in 1936, in a New York workshop run by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. He also knew about the Surrealists’ experiments with spontaneously applied paint, and used it himself off and on throughout the early to mid 1940s. By 1947 he had perfected the technique of pouring, flinging and spattering liquid paint, and could control its flow to achieve the effects he was after. He explained his method when he narrated a film of himself at work, made by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg, released in 1951. Fiction: Pollock got drunk in order to paint. Fact: He did have a serious drinking problem, but instead of stimulating his creativity, alcohol interfered with it.

Far from being a drunken paint-slinger, he was not able to work when he was intoxicated. To get away from what he called the “wear and tear” of New York City, in late 1945 he and Krasner moved to eastern Long Island. There he was able to quit drinking for two years, 1949-50, and he became very productive. For example, in 1945 he painted only 20 canvases, but in 1949, when he was on the wagon, he painted twice as many. In 1950, his most productive year, he painted nearly 50. Many people also think that all his paintings are large, but the really big ones, like Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 (National Gallery of Australia) are the exceptions. Most of his paintings are small to medium size. He preferred to paint on large canvases, but he admitted that they were impractical. He had to live on the sale of his work, and smaller pictures were much easier to sell.

Jackson Pollock (Photo by Tony Vaccarro/Getty Images) Fiction: Pollock listened to jazz music while he painted. Fact: He loved jazz, and had a big collection of 78 rpm phonograph records, but he never played them in the studio. His paintings have often been compared to improvisational jazz, and the two art forms do have a lot in common, but Pollock was not dancing around the canvas to the beat of a Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington tune. The studio had no electricity until late in his life, so he couldn’t plug in a record player or radio, and there’s no evidence of a wind-up phonograph in the many photos of the converted barn where he worked. That studio, and the house that contains his record collection and his hi-fi record player, vintage 1954, are now a museum, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center , in East Hampton New York. Pollock and Krasner lived there from November 1945 until their deaths. There’s an inventory of the record collection on the website, under the Study Center’s research library tab . Fiction: Pollock never made much money from his art.

Fact: By 1952, smart collectors had decided to bet on Pollock, and he started to earn real money. He had a respected art dealer, Sidney Janis, who knew how to promote him. When the average annual wage was $2,100, Pollock was taking home more than five times that much. Compared to the prices for his work today, when a small Pollock painting can sell for tens of millions, getting one for $6,000 seems like a steal, but in the mid 1950s it was a lot to pay for a contemporary American painting. That’s what the collector Ben Heller paid for One: Number 31, 1950 , which is now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Krasner benefitted greatly from the rising prices after Pollock’s death. As his widow and sole heir, she managed his legacy very shrewdly. When she died in 1984, her estate established the Pollock-Krasner Foundation , which gives grants to artists around the world. Helen A. Harrison is the Eugene V. and Clare E.

Thaw Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center . Her latest book, a monograph on Jackson Pollock in Phaidon’s Focus series, is available from Amazon . Please visit the author’s website for the book’s source notes. Tags

Question: In which decade of his life was Jackson Pollock when he died?
Answer: 40s